“Global warming” (printed in the July 19 edition) asks “which is it global warming, climate change or manmade global warming?” Answer: Global warming causes climate change and global warming is caused, in our era, by burning fossil fuels (National Academy of Sciences).The “warming” letter says climate change has been going on “since the beginning of time.” However, greenhouse gasses, principally CO2, have caused every period of climate change except the asteroid hit that killed the dinosaurs. This time humans are the cause, mainly our CO2 emissions” (skepticalscience.org).“Warming” confuses weather with climate and politics with science. It claims there’s “lots to read” (on the internet) “debunking” the 97% consensus on AGW. That figure is prominently displayed on the National Academy of Sciences website and accepted by every scientific body of national or international standing. NASA’s website has a list of all 230 of them.“Warming” recommends doing your own research, but then cherry picks from denier websites, not NASA or NOAA for global temperatures. And thus comes to the mistaken conclusion that AGW is not settled science.In fact, The National Academy of Sciences says we are fast running out of time to prevent “catastrophic” climate change that will create “global economic collapse” followed by “societal collapse.”If we act now, we can prevent that and make Americans better off financially by using a proven, conservative economic plan called “carbon fee-and-dividend.”
CFD will tax fossil fuels out of existence and give all of that tax money to the taxpayers in equal monthly “carbon dividend” checks. This will create a $50-trillion dollar clean-energy industry (Bloomberg) and millions of jobs, over 147,000 in Virginia (Stanford University’s solutionsproject.org) and increase GDP $75-80 billion annually and use market forces to make other nations cut their emissions as much as we do (citizensclimatelobby.org).
Lynn Goldfarb
